Readers have already heard from me twice about this book since I've been reading it. I finished re-reading the epilogue last night,* and am now ready to formally review it.
The author Michael Willrich is a good historian and also a good writer. These qualities do not always travel together, and it is not without cost when they do. There is some risk to being a good historian that arises from being a good writer, namely, that you can tend to shade the reader's perceptions of the history by incorporating dramaticism that will tend to make some of the characters seem like heroes, or victims, or villains. There is some of that going on here, though Willrich's real heroes are not the anarchists but the liberals who ended up supporting them.
Indeed, this is the main lesson he wants you as a reader to take away from the work. Here is his summation in the epilogue:
The government's decades-long war against anarchy spurred the growth of federal institutions designed to repress political dissent. The same struggle also inspired the emergence of a modern movement for civil liberties, grounded in the Bill of Rights, including broad freedoms of speech, freedom from warrantless searches and 'third degree' interrogations, and rights of due process...
It is the great irony of the story told in these pages that the many trials of the anarchists -- working-class thinkers who denounced the liberal ideal of the rule of law as a dangerous delusion -- breathed new life into the Bill of Rights and spurred a probing public debate about the proper legal limits of government power[.] (374)
The real heroes of his work are liberal lawyer
Harry Weinberger and liberal Assistant Secretary of Labor
Louis Post, not the anarchists that we spend so much time with during the telling. The villains are J. Edgar Hoover, Palmer, and a host of others who erected the police state we still labor under in their attempt to police immigrants they didn't trust.
The victims, mostly, are the anarchists, although Willrich doesn't attempt to hide that their movement did indeed engage in numerous bombings and bombing plots, stabbings, shootings, and other mayhem. He does note that many other charges were made but not proven by any evidence or arrests, but he does so fairly: in the case of the largest bombing, which police could never solve, he points out that historians have since identified the probable criminal as an Italian anarchist. Similarly diligent, he points out that one of Emma Goldman's moving stories about the Statue of Liberty is impossible given the fact that the Statue hadn't been assembled yet at the time that she says it happened.
I recommend the book, which is insightful and illustrative. It is surprisingly relevant to the current moment when we are experiencing an even larger-scale attempt at mass deportation, a Federal government that is trying to limit due process in such cases in order to streamline them. While his heroes are the liberals, Republicans do get a nice word towards the end for standing up to the Wilson administration's tyrannical overreach. He quotes their platform of 1920: "[I]n view of the vigorous malpractice of the Departments of Justice and Labor, an adequate public hearing before a competent administrative tribunal should be assured to all." (376)
The weakness of the book, aside from the dramatic elements, is the author's lack of interest in philosophy. He takes no care to explain, and barely even to name, the different factions of anarchist thought. These are intricate and interesting, then and into the present day. The effect of this lack of interest is to convey the idea that anarchism was some sort of amorphous blob of working-class thought, perhaps mere utopian thinking (so he describes it in the epilogue), when in fact it was (and is still, in newer forms) deeply detailed and thoroughly considered with clear philosophical factions. You will learn almost nothing about anarchism by reading this book, but you will nevertheless learn a lot about America.
* I read the epilogue the first time when I first started reading the book. This is a tip I learned in my graduate studies in history that I pass along to you, which is most useful when trying to tackle a large historical monograph: read the first and the last parts immediately, and then the rest of it. The author will introduce his topic and give you a hint of what he or she thinks the main lesson is in his introduction, and then will reaffirm that in the conclusion. Once you know the basic thing the author wants to convey, the whole work will make more sense because it will all fit into that pattern. You can then read and digest the book much faster and more effectively because you will understand why every part of it is being introduced and described, and what the author hopes you will get out of each piece of evidence.
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